Monday 25 June, 2007

Frankfurter Rundschau 25.06.2007

The Rheingau Musik Festival takes place until September 1 in and around Frankfurt. Tim Gorbauch was at the opening concert, Mahler's Third Symphony, performed by the Hessische Rundfunk Sinfonie Orchester under chief conductor Paavo Järvi. "Järvi makes no secret of his vision of Mahler as a thoroughly modern composer. Despite its explosive force, the first movement is free of late Romantic pathos, and Järvi guides his orchestra through the exorbitant score with utmost sovereignty. In the best moments, he compresses the will-o'-the-wisp, heterogeneous styles into a simultaneousness of the radically disparate, agglomerating the countless elements into the most compact space. This music seeks to be everything at once: holy, vulgar, exalted, abysmal, burlesque, sentimental, nostalgic and sublimely beautiful. And how Järvi captures this is simply magnificent."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 25.06.2007

Julia Voss met the Russian journalist Elena Tregubova, author of the book "Tales of a Kremlin Digger," in London. Like the widow of Alexander Litvinenko, Tregubova holds Putin and his entourage responsible for the political murders of recent years. Her own life is also highly endangered, Tregubova concludes from Putin's behaviour: "Putin doesn't care a whit about images, she says. The murder of Anna Politkovskaya and his snide remarks about it, all that has a message, she contends. That message is the following, and is sent out to dissidents: 'In the West you can be as famous as Politkovskaya. But that won't protect you.' With Litvinenko's poisoning, the statement was then expanded: 'You'll die like dogs.'"

Art historian Werner Spies writes a tribute to the photographer Bernd Becher (pictures), who died last Friday at the age of 75. Becher, together with his wife Hilla, taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was the inspirational mentor to such photographers as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth. "Over the years – unbeknownst to most – they created an ice-cold archive of the industrial world. Their subjects were the production facilities that had disappeared behind stock reports and balance sheets. Bernd and Hilla Becher went about their work objectively, without subjective intervention. Like in August Sander's collective work 'People of the 20th century,' their project was about abundance and typology. There were no national boundaries in their work. The photographers travelled together through other countries and continents, collecting according to their transcendental categories, looking for the changing forms created by inventive spirits in response to industrialisation." (See our interview with Bernd and Hilla Becher, "High precision industrial age souvenirs" )


Die Welt 25.06.2007

Former Dutch politician, journalist and co-author of Theo can Gogh's film "Submission", Ayaan Hirsi Ali suggests that the West demand an apology from Muslims for their criticism of Salman Rushdie's being knighted. "Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is right: the West is making a fatal error by leaving the forces of intolerance to occupy the field of insults. The West must stand firm. By knighting Rushdie, the Queen is honouring the freedom of conscience and art that the West loves. That makes her a symbol of our free thought rather than just a symbol of lost royal power. Long live the Queen!"


Die Presse 25.06.2007

Andre Glucksmann (more) sees parallels between the West's initial tolerance of Hitler and that of Putin, "which is not to say that Putin is Hitler. When Hermann Broch was asked if he considered all Austrians to be Nazis, he said: No. But there are worse sins; the crime of indifference. Today we're in the midst of it. The last genocide of the 20th century was in Rwanda; in three months, the Hutu murdered about a million Tutsis, that's 10,000 a day. Not even the Nazis reached such records. A Canadian UN General (more) implored Kofi Annan: send 5,000 well-armed blue helmets and I'll stop the genocide. Nothing happened. Another example: Hutus and Tutsis are very religious, Catholic. Did the church, which has paid a lot of attention to the Shoah, ever consider the unspeakable: that for the first time, a genocide of Catholics by Catholics was taking place? The degree of reflection is about zero."


Saturday 23 June, 2007

Frankfurter Rundschau 23.06.2007

Martin Gerner reports on a film festival in Kabul and the resurrection of cinema in Afghanistan: "On the second day of the festival, a bomb explodes not far from the French Cultural Centre, where the films are being shown. There are many deaths. Nevertheless, this place is more secure than a half dozen other cinemas in Kabul. 'In the 60s and 70s, audiences were comprised of educated families, and there were evening screenings. Today unemployed youths, derelicts, drug addicts and criminals cavort in the theatres', says Jawanshir Haidary of the Filmmakers' Union. Herat, the second biggest city in the country, still has no new cinema to replace the old one. 'I'm now 27, and I was never once in a cinema in my home town," says film director Fahim Hashimi. The former cinema was converted into a mosque under the Taliban."


Die Tageszeitung 23.06.2007

In a lenghty interview, historian J. Adam Tooze once more contradicts Götz Aly's thesis that the plundering of the Jews by the Nazis played an important role in financing the German war effort: "Even in 1938/39, the plundering of the German and Austrian Jews brought the Reich no more than two billion marks in cash, while the occupation of France brought in 13 billion. The exploitation of the occupied countries and that of the Jews are therefore two separate topics, with entirely different magnitudes. Confusing these is another of Götz Aly's mistakes." (Two years ago Tooze criticised Aly's book "Hitler's Volksstaat" in this paper. Aly's answer is here. Tooze has now published his own book on the economic history of the Nazi era, "Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy.")


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 23.06.2007

Indian author Ranjit Hoskote (more) and Ilija Trojanow write that the most recent demonstrations in Pakistan and Iran against Salman Rushdie are nothing more than a staging of popular rage to distract from domestic problems. "Everyone knows the game, the symbolism is familiar to us all. All that remains are the logistic of the protests – trucks, megaphones, flags and posters. Even the stages are known to all, the squares in front of certain mosques, the public parks. Finally, all that was needed was a call to the television stations – and one had the world's attention. The loud disgust in the West raised interest at the local level. The organisers of such protests understand well the aesthetics and power of television."